Many of us have bought Series I Savings Bonds in the past, and it appears criminals have also been taking notice. From the CNBC article California woman pleads guilty in $1.6 million counterfeit Series I savings bond scheme:
A California woman pled guilty to helping process more than $1.6 million in counterfeit Treasury Department Series I savings bonds through financial institutions around the United States, the Department of Justice said Thursday.
Summer Marie Creech, 45, forged counterfeit I bonds using authentic bond numbers and sent them to co-conspirators who used stolen identification to redeem the forgeries at financial institutions in south Texas and elsewhere, according to the DOJ.
A concerning detail here is that the articles states she used authentic bond serial numbers. Where did she get them? Are they issued in some sort of predictable order or algorithm? Did they find some banks that just paid out cash?
How do I know that someone else hasn’t already redeemed a counterfeit savings bonds with MY serial number(s) on it? I can only look up the value based on issue date at TreasuryDirect.gov Paper Savings Bond Calculator (you can enter any serial number you like). There is no way to confirm if my specific serial number has already been cashed in (by me or by someone else). This may be another reason for me to convert the paper savings bonds into the electronic version and track it online. I’ve been turned off by the very long wait times recently along the possibility of it being lost in the mail, but I may have to bite the bullet.
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Makes you wonder whether someone at some point hacked that Savings Bond Calculator (wasn’t it called a “wizard” back when?).
Hard to have a lot of confidence in the electronic form either, given the fact that short maintenance outages have expanded into multi-day downtimes and “contact us” by email hasn’t been supported in some time.
I’d probably have thought myself the last person to say this, but an allocation in cryptocurrency seems to make sense more and more as our understanding of “riskless asset” evolves…
The alleged perpetrator wasn’t Saved by the Bell.
While this is a real possibility that a scammer forged my Series I Bonds, but entrusting them to Treasury Direct is also a high risk. First, the bonds being lost in mail or lost during the conversion process. Second, Treaury Direct can lock anyone’s account at any time for any reason. I’ve had my account bricked until I got a physical form signed by a bank officer and physically snail mailed to the Treasury Dept and then wait four months.
BME,
Had to do the same with a treasury held in my son’s name that froze me out when he turned 18. Had to snail mail notarized document that took about the same time for them to process.